The "Over Training" Myth

As the old saying goes, it's better to be 10% under trained than 1% over trained. I have repeated this mantra myself for years until I learned better. My reeducation on this idea came during my training for a 50 mile race. I knew that this was going to be a one shot race and also knew I had all the time in the world to complete it (29 hours). I didn’t need to prepare for speed, what I needed to do was prepare to NOT fail. In other words, I needed to become durable enough to survive this event. Ironically this is very similar to the whole philosophy behind Legion of Longevity—which is to stay in the game.

How is that training different you ask? Think of it like building a house. When you start any new effort you are like a straw house and the training is the storm. You start with a small storm and your little straw house gets damaged. You lose a chunk of the roof, maybe a shutter or two and your job is to put the house back together—traditionally this is called recovery. The trick is that when you rebuild the damaged areas, you get to build them back with a little stronger material than you started with. As long as you have completely repaired your house before the next storm, this cycle continues until you have built a fortress which should withstand the strongest storm of all and that would be the race.

The problem in this plan happens when you are in the middle of repairing your house when the next storm hits. Your house sustains more damage than before and more rebuilding is needed. If that’s not complete by the time the next storm hits, you could face total destruction which is commonly known as an injury. From there, you have to start all over from the foundation up. I share this analogy to make the point that typically it’s not the storm that really gets you: it’s the lack of repair. That’s why I personally believe that over training is a myth, it’s really under recovery.

In Christie Aschwanden’s book “Good to Go”, she introduces a version of this house analogy while using science to debunk many of the magic recovery methods that are sold on the market. The fact is that recovery used to mean something different before we made it a verb as another function to do. There are some practices that can aid in recovery, but very few that speed it up. The only way to shorten your time between storms (training) is to have developed a strong enough structure (durability) and that takes time.

Taking time and having patience are not sexy ideas and it’s hard to tie something to them that we can sell. For that reason companies will try to convince you that they have a magic bullet or secret potion but the fact is we need adequate time to put our house in order. At Legion of Longevity we believe there’s power in knowledge and that’s something we want to share.

Now, full disclosure, I train pretty much every day. I know that may sound hypocritical to everything I said above, but what you don’t know is how much training I skipped to get to this place. For example, when I looked for training plans for the 50, I took the one with the lowest mileage and cut the weekly mileage in half and doubled the time to prepare. It worked out pretty well since I completed the race only needing 1/3rd of the time I had to finish.

If you are having a hard time getting your house (body) built the way you want, let us know. Here at Legion of Longevity we have access to strong coaches in the area of fitness, nutrition and behavior to help you directly or help you find what you need.